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  • Roberto Galoppini 11:21 am on June 24, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Links: 24-06-2007 (more about the importance of being called Open Source) 

    Open Source Comedy as Smart Marketing – What about making an Open Source Comedy to tell people about “false” Open Source firms? Between irony and sarcasm there is plenty of space for education through fun

    What makes an open source company: Centric CRM’s response – Michael Harvey gives his explanation of what open source is. Is granting customers the freedom to modify their software or any part of it for internal use enough? I doubt

    Little red hens of open source CRM – Dana Blankenhorn come back talking about the Open Source CRM thing: The value of business software comes out only when you work with it, when you tweak it, when you support it. Absolutely right, s I mentioned few times, there is no third way in this respect: best code or best knowledge.

    Pragmatic Open Source РCot̩ starting from the perennial open source question goes much, much beyond. A must read.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:38 am on June 23, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Links about the importance of being called Open Source 

    Calling Socialtext Open Source – Ross Mayfield, SocialText CEO, asks the community what they should call themselves, while telling us about the experience to get his license certified by OSI.

    Thoughts on OSI, OSD and quasi-open source – Alex Fletcher suggests OSI to proceed constructing (and consistently update) a comprehensive account of the open source which is in violation of its definition of open source, and promote this list to the general community.

    OSI to take more active role in open source definition enforcement – Ryan Paul at ArsTechinica says that although he sympathizea with OSI’s concern about vendor abuse of the “open source” label, the organization should be above starting a needless fight that it can’t win.

    The OSI crackdown: too little, too late? – Gianugo talking about Tiemann’s position, come out with thr idea of an awareness campaign, making sure that the world knows who’s been fathering the Open Source Definition, and what is not. I buy the idea.

    Micheal Tiemann: Protecting the Open Source Definition – Amy Stephen does some hypothesis about what might happen, food for thoughts.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, OSI, Tiemann, SocialText

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:13 pm on June 22, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Initiative: About the importance of being called Open Source 

    Michael Tiemann, President of the Open Source Initiative, yesterday took a clear position against the abuse of the term Open Source, replying to a Dana Blankenhorn post ” How far can open source CRM get?“.

    I have been on the board of the OSI for more than 5 years, and until last year it was fairly easy for us to police the term open source: once every 2-3 months we’d receive notice that some company or another was advertising that their software was “open source” when the license was not approved by the OSI board and, upon inspection, was clearly not open source. We (usually Russ Nelson) would send them a notice politely telling them “We are the Open Source Initiative. We wrote a definition of what it means to be open source, we promote that definition, and that’s what the world expects when they see the term mentioned. Do you really want to explain to your prospective customers ‘um…we don’t actually intend to offer you these freedoms and rights you expect?’.” And they would promptly respond by saying “Wow! We had no idea!” Maybe once or twice they would say “What a novel idea! We’ll change our license to one that’s approved by you!”. Most of the time they would say “Oops! Thanks for letting us know–we’ll promote our software in some other way.” And they did, until last year.

    It is interesting to see how things change: O tempora, o mores (Alas for the times and the manners).

    So here’s what I propose: let’s all agree–vendors, press, analysts, and others who identify themselves as community members–to use the term ‘open source’ to refer to software licensed under an OSI-approved license. If no company can be successful by selling a CRM solution licensed under an OSI-approved license, then OSI (and the open source movement) should take the heat for promoting a model that is not sustainable in a free market economy. We can treat that case as a bug, and together we can work (with many eyes) to discern what it is about the existing open source definition or open source licenses made CRM a failure when so many other applications are flourishing. But just because a CEO thinks his company will be more successful by promoting proprietary software as open source doesn’t teach anything about the true value of open source.

    Stand up Stand up by groc

    I welcome Tiemann stand up, really. Nonetheless I am among them thinking that Tiemann could hardly enforce his plan, though. My concerns are about the following open issues:

    4. Send your proposed license by email to license-approval@opensource.org. Indicate in the email whether you want the license posted to the license-discuss list with your identification or anonymously. We are willing to consider licenses that the author doesn’t want posted at all, but since community review is an important part of the approval process, we will have to circulate such licenses privately to individual reviewers: because of this, licenses not posted to license-discuss at all may take longer to approve, and are likely to require more interaction with you

    Consider taking a position also on these issues, please.

    Technorati Tags: OSI, Tiemann, attribution, Open Source

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:37 pm on June 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Community Development: SourceForge.net in Rome, a chat with Ross Turk, SF Community Manager 

    Few weeks ago Ross Turk, SourceForge Community Manager, went to LinuxTag to find out more about the open source community in Germany. While in Europe, he decided to visit me in Italy to do the same thing.

    Ross asked me to have a conversation to better understand how SourceForge.net can be a more useful resource to Italian open source developers and users, and we started talking about SF Marketplace. Ross understandably refused to gossip about what Michael Rudolph, formerly working at eBay, will be doing with his new (beta) trading platform. Despite his “corporate silence”, I took the chance to tell him few things I would like to see on SF Marketplace:

    • Ads that sells: the SF marketplace once up and running will likely be a “glocal” market, and I see a tremendous opportunity to sell ads to local providers (needless to say based on searches, top downloads, etc);
      .
    • Fostering communities: The SF marketplace could greatly help upcoming projects to find developers, users and customers, through local get-together, sprints or virtual meet-ups. Cross-projects collaboration in the long tail, new (unexpected) open source stacks, and much more, the sky is the limit;
      .
    • Adding value to value: the SF marketplace might address the needs of SMBs looking for single developers or small firms, but could also respond to the medium size enterprises’ needs, looking for complete IT services. Sooner or later Cross-selling, Up-selling and Down-selling will find their way, I guess.
      .

    Ross eventually ended answering also some questions, below the interview:

    Italian bloggers meet Bruce Perens Ross Turk at LinuxTag by Axel Hecht

    Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you get where you are today?

    I started working for SourceForge in May of 2000. Of course, we were called VA Linux at that time, and I was an engineer in the Professional Services team. Shortly after I started, we began getting requests to install corporate instances of SourceForge.net, and I was among a handful of engineers initially performing those deployments. After a while, VA Linux decided to turn what we were doing into SourceForge Enterprise Edition and become VA Software. I stayed on and became a PS Architect, where I met with customers and did some of our heavier customizations.
    In about 2005, I was looking for a change. I asked to be moved to the SourceForge.net team, where I became the Engineering Manager. The two years I spent in that position were a tremendous education for me! Very few people get the opportunity to be so closely involved in the architeture and operation of such a large web site. However, the more I learned about the site, the more I began to see the need for better communication with our user community. The minimal time I could devote to community-based activity just wasn’t enough. In the last half of 2006, it became clear that it could use someone’s full-time focus – I asked for the job, and that’s what I’m doing now!

    You’re the Community Manager for SourceForge.net. What does that mean?

    Our team is now more focused on what will make the community successful than I’ve ever seen it. Certainly, the position of Community Manager isn’t like anything SourceForge.net has had before.
    When you reduce it down to its simplest form, my job is to talk to as many people in the SourceForge.net and open source communities as possible. I am here to spread the word about SourceForge.net and ensure that our constituents know what we’re up to. More importantly, I’m here to provide my organization with the “eyes and ears” that it needs to help our community members succeed at what they’re trying to do.

    I think that if the members of our community are successful, we will be too.
    I think that I just may have the coolest job of anyone I know. I get to talk to the smartest, most innovative, and most passionate people in the industry, and I get to travel the world while I’m doing it.

    What has the SourceForge.net crew been up to recently?

    We just launched the open beta of the SourceForge.net Marketplace, a set of tools on the site that allow our community to buy and sell goods and services from one another. Using these tools, any member of our community with expertise on a particular project or technology can make their services available to everyone else. I think these features will be invaluable – not only for developers looking for a way to financially support their open source work, but also for end users looking for access to those most familiar with the technology they use. It’s a whole new direction for the site, and our team is really excited to be working on something fresh!

    We also introduced wiki functionality into our project toolset through a collaboration with Wikispaces. Their wiki tool is full-featured and user-friendly, and having their help allowed us to release this functionality a lot quicker than if we’d have written it by ourselves. Needless to say, we expect this to become a large part of our projects’ tool arsenals.

    However, the nearest and dearest to me is the SourceForge.net Community Section. As I’m writing this, it’s still being built…[now live, see it] but by the time your readers see this, it’ll probably be live at http://sourceforge.net/community.

    It consists of a blog we can use to talk about our feature roadmap, make announcements, and highlight some of the personalities in our community that readers might find interesting. It will also have a forum system that will allow users to discuss things related to open source and SourceForge.net. The first thing that I plan to promote heavily on the Community Section will be our Community Choice Awards, which entered their primary nomination phase a few weeks ago.

    I would love to talk with your readers about any of these topics, or anything else related to SourceForge.net or open source, and I can always be reached at rturk@corp.sourceforge.com. Thanks for taking the time to write about what we’re up to!

    Thank you Ross for your answers, happy hacking!

    Technorati Tags: SourceForge, Marketplace, RossTurk

     

    • Ross Turk 5:53 pm on June 25, 2007 Permalink

      Hey Roberto 🙂 Thanks for the post.

      I forgot to add – if anyone is interested in becoming a seller in our beta marketplace, they can add their name to our interest list here.

      Cya,
      Ross

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:53 pm on June 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Links: 19-05-2007 

    Services, Part 3: The Future – third post of an interesting trilogy about walking the open source path, by Tarus Balog. Recommended to VCs interested in investing in Open Source Service firms.

    Commercial Joomla Developers Fight To Avoid Destruction – Wired on Joomla going GPL 100%, if interested in the subject read also Joomla 1.5 and the limits of open source development.

    Open Source: What Makes for Success? – Illuminata talks about what are the conditions that enable success in Open Source. I would suggest them to talk more about the importance of the Community thing.

    How Viable Is Open Source ECM? (subscription needed)- Does it answer the question? written by Integrated Solutions.

    Adobe to Open Source Flex. A Sign of Desperation? – Analysis of Adobe move, by Coach Wei

    Lumen Software’s New PostgreSQL LAPP Stack Offers Commercial Alternative to MySQL LAMP Solutions – Lumen bets on LAPP SaaS vs LAMP. I guess (many) other OS firms will start offering SaaS stacks.

    History of glibc and Linux libc – The GNU C Library fork story, by Ciarán O’Riordan.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:11 pm on June 18, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Business Models: about Joomla going GPL 100% 

    Joomla! announced its committment to fully compliance with the GNU GPL license, a very important step and definitely not an easy decision to take. Joomla!, one of the most popular Open Source CMS platform in fact, is based on the Voluntary Production Model, but it is different from any other projects.

    Freedom Freedom, by cattycamehome

    As I recently happened to know from Amy Stephen, Mambo contributors – and hence later Joomla! contributors as well – were allowed to release proprietary “extensions”, a term used to mean anything you can “add on”. A pretty peculiar characteristic of Joomla! project indeed, and also not an easy issue to address now, as results from the Joomla announcement:

    It’s a long, slow road.We’re not going to make any sudden moves because we know that a lot of people are relying on us to maintain some stability and meet expectations. We are very much aware that a lot of people make their living around Joomla!, and we are sensitive to producing sudden disruptions in livelihoods [..].

    We will provide facts as soon as we have them. If we seem too silent, it’s because we don’t want to speak until we can do so clearly and confidently. And you’ll have plenty of notice before any large changes get made.

    Apparently it is great time to share some ideas about possible directions:

    • Joomla! marketplace: making available all GPL extensions through a vertical marketplace could bring authors consulting opportunities, compensating for fewer deals;
      .
    • Joomla! Enterprises Association: IT firms and individual developers involved with Joomla! could start a business partner network;
      .
    • Re-coding proprietary extensions: Favoured or Popular proprietary extensions could eventually be re-coded allocating funds raised by OpenSourceMatters, if feasible.
      .

    Marketplace.
    Contributors moving from a proprietary licensing scheme to a pure GPL might sell less copies, is a matter of fact. But is their business all about selling proprietary extensions? If this is not the case a vertical marketplace would cover other business areas.

    Enterprise Association.
    Joomla!, as many other Open Source projects, is not a Corporate Actor. As results also from Observatory of European SMBs – see “High Tech SMEs in Europe” – the lack of a coordinator is a known critical success factor:

    For high-tech SMEs (SMB) networks are almost a necessity to perform innovation projects and tap the required information and know-how to conduct business. Networks make possible the sharing of costs as well as risk sharing and contribute to business success.[..]
    The following barriers to networking, specific to smaller high-tech firms, can be identified: (i) Often there is a lack of a ‘co-ordinator’, which might be an agency or a larger leading firm. (ii) Small firms, in contrast to large ones, have a short-term perspective and expect quick and concrete results. [..] To reduce efforts co-operation is kept simple and built with only very few partners. (iii) It is difficult to find a balance between the privacy of information and the necessary knowledge sharing.

    Zope Europe Association, now known as ZEA Partners, is a good example of how a business partner network might work, delivering bigger projects and representing an ‘institutional interlocutor’. Paul Everitt did a very good job with it, indeed.

    Recoding proprietary extensions.
    I guess that only a fraction of Joomla! Extensions are really important to the majority of users and customers. If my assumptions are right, I believe that at the end of the day you might consider recoding only them, asking users to help you prioritizing them.

    A final suggestion about the FAQ:

    What is the difference between “commercial” and “proprietary”?

    Commercial software means that there is some sort of commercial activity surrounding that software. It could be a business that develops it and charges money for distribution, support, documentation, customization, etc. Commercial software is not necessarily proprietary software and proprietary software is not necessarily commercial software. Proprietary software means that you do not have the right to copy, modify, and redistribute that software.

    I would suggest to add that commercial means also something oriented toward profit, and in this respect Commercial Open Source represents a chance to share costs and risks among consumers as well. And yes, a Joomla! Collaborative initiatives might also be a viable option!

    Long life to Joomla, my personal CMS platform of choice!

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Joomla, GPL, business model, CMS

     

    • Amy Stephen 4:38 pm on June 18, 2007 Permalink

      Roberto – Thank you for sharing your expertise with the Joomla! community, thanks for your support of Joomla! during this challenging time, too. We benefit from community members like yourself who help solve problems.

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:34 pm on June 18, 2007 Permalink

      Dear Amy, I believe that Joomla! took the right choice, but probably is not going to be easy, though. Joomla! third party developers might experience new business styles: more choices, more chances! Let’s work together to make Joomla! a great business case!

    • Nestor Toothacre 3:21 am on May 22, 2012 Permalink

      Thx for information.

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:46 pm on June 15, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Internet Governance Forum: updates for the next meeting 

    The Government of Brazil will host in Rio de Janeiro on 12 – 15 November 2007 the second Internet Governance Forum meeting. The IGF website – run by the IGF Secretariat – supports the United Nations Secretary-General in carrying out the mandate from the World Summit on the Information Society with regard to convening a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue – namely the Internet Governance Forum.
    Now a revised schedule for the Rio de Janeiro Meeting and a revised programme outline is available.

    Technorati Tags: Internet Governance Forum, Brasil, Open Consultation

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:43 pm on June 14, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Marketing: Italian bloggers met Bruce Perens 

    Last Friday some Italian bloggers met Bruce Perens, it was a trial of running an open source awareness meeting to get in touch to individuals outside our network.

    In Italy Open Source is experiencing a clique phenomenon, and there is a need for hubs to be in place in other areas. I asked Nicola Mattina, an Italian known blogger with a wide professional experience in Communication and new media, to help me to organize the event.

    Italian bloggers meet Bruce Perens Italian bloggers meet Bruce Perens by Roldano De Persio

    Here the list of bloggers at the event: Alessio Jacona (corporate blogging), Luca Sartoni (free software activist), Leo Sorge (journalist), Francesco Romeo, Massimiliano Mirra (developer), Tara Kelly (entrepreneur and designer), Roldano De Persio (marketing and photographer), Fabio Masetti (IT freelance), Andrea Martines (web accessibility expert), Nicola Mattina and myself.

    Bruce gave a speech introducing himself and his job over the last twenty years, getting a chance to tell people about his relationship with his previous and actual employer, with his customers, but also about freedom and democracy.

    Among non-open source topics covered, it is worth to mention the network neutrality and the importance of bloggers independence, and his invite to work hard to keep the Internet for everyone.

    I wish to thank Bruce Perens, who kindly welcomed the idea to meet Italian bloggers, Ernst & Young who guested our informal meeting by its office in Rome and, last but not least, all participants that made it a reality.

    I hope it to be the first meeting of a long series, and I agree with Roldano saying that in its simplicity it was a great thing: a get-together of bloggers, Internet citizens eager to know more and talk about a phenomenon that is changing our daily life.

    [italian bloggers, open source, perens]

     

    • Leo Sorge 7:49 pm on June 15, 2007 Permalink

      Bruce Perens is a great person. In 30 years of journalistic activity, I never found a single person who moves around the room to get close to each person who asks him a question.
      He touched some great topics and he answered a few questions. What he said was interesting, but I mostly appreciated the way he pronounced those words. The words of a most respectful person.
      I thank Bruce for the time he gave us. I wish him the very best.
      Leo Sorge

    • Massimiliano 10:47 pm on June 17, 2007 Permalink

      After more than half a decade spent coding and breathing open source software, meeting someone who played a chief role in shaping the open source movement was an honour; discovering a wonderful person, a pleasure. Bruce Perens gets too easily pigeonholed into the “pragmatic” character, especially when contrasted with the likes of Stallman; if you have a chance to listen to him in person, though, I think you’ll find that “pragmatism” here is simply the kind of passion strong enough that it’s willing to step back and give way to reason when that helps the goal.

      Thanks, Roberto & friends for arranging the meeting, and thanks, Bruce, for the words of wisdom.

      All the best,

      Massimiliano

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:13 pm on June 13, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Links: 13-06-2007 

    Should I become an Industry Analyst? – James wisely observes that open source analysis has still to address some open issues to get more powerful, and he calls for action: I am here!

    CMS Deployment Patterns – “Baking” vs “Frying” in the CMS arena, I hope Seth will keep posting on this subject telling us which Open Source CMS suites better for those scenarios.

    Thoughts on the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Project – Alex talks about Ubuntu extending its brand into the unwired arena. Will it work, eventually?

    US Patent Office to Try ‘Open Source’ Approach – Will you work for free (as in beer) to help patent examiners do their job? Apparently Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, HP, CA, and General Electric are backing Professor Beth Simone Noveck.s efforts for the formation of a Community Patent Review project.

    The Open Source Business Meme – Inspirational guidelines for open source firms: three to avoid, three to embrace, by Stephen o’grady.

    Where do I download OpenSolaris”? – Good hints Simon from Ian Murdock, have a look!

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:42 pm on June 12, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian new tech startups – The Best Ecosystem for Technology Start-ups: the Italian Evidence 

    Researchers and policy makers agree on the fact that New Tech Based Firms (NTBF) play a fundamental role in modern industrialized economies. This is all the more true in Italy. On the one hand, in fact, due to the weakness of the national high tech industry, there is a great need for a complete generational renovation in the enterprise operating in this sector. On the other hand, the country presents many success stories of new enterprises operating the the medium and low tech content sectors. Therefore the question arises concerning the conditions necessary in Italy for the development of top level firms operating in high tech sectors.

    In this context, the analysis produced by the RITA Observatory of the Department of Management Engineering of the Polytechnic of Milan (RITA Report 2005) showed that Italy boasts a vast number of young high tech enterprises that could be candidates to become “gazelles”.

    KDE Resting Gazelle, by khosey1

    These enterprises are concentrated in the stronger parts of the country, particularly in Lombardy (30.3%), while their presence is far rarer in the Southern Italy (15.4%). Moreover the productive specialization of these enterprises is influenced by the traditional vocations of Italian regions and the presence of large enterprises operating in related sectors. In particular two thirds of all NTBFs operate in the service sector (software, Internet services, TLC and desktop publishing). In the manufacturing sector, a fundamental role is played by ICT (21.6% of the total, 8% of which in electronic, optical and biomedical tools) and automation and robotics (19%). The share of NTBFs operating in biotechnologies, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and new materials is more modest (4.9%).

    The birth rate of Italian NTBFs underwent a significant increase in the latter half of nineties. Nonetheless, after the pinnacle reached in 2000, their birth rate is decreasing with the important exception of start ups generated by the public research system.

    This is due to the negative effects created by the new economy bubble and, more generally, to the unfavourable macro economic conditions that have recently affected a vast portion of the high technology sector. Nonetheless, the enterprises have survived this period of competitive selection are starting to exhibit a new vivacity, which is particularly visible in the increase of indications related to innovative activities such as patenting and participating in research projects financed by the European Union.

    (source: “an eye to innovation” newsletter, by FILAS)

    Reading the ICT market in 2006 report, edited by AITECH-Assinform – the Italian association of Information & Communication Technology companies – apparently the IT Services shows some (little) sign of recovery (+0.4%), but software development and maintenance and data processing are both experiencing a downturn (-0.7% and -2.3% respectively).

    Also interesting to notice that apparently innovation by Italian business does not take place on a co-operative basis, as results from the fourth Community Innovation Survey, by EUROSTAT.

    Co-operation with customers in innovation activities ranged from 4% in Spain to 41% in Finland, and I am wondering what about launching an Italian Cooperative Software Initiative?

    Technorati Tags: startups, ecosystem, innovation, open source

     

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